Entertainment Industry Wants More People To Know About OpenBitTorrent Tracker

from the for-what-reason? dept

The definition of insanity, the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. For the past decade, the entertainment industry has sued one site or service after another that was used for unauthorized file sharing at some time. In every single case, the act of suing that site or service ended up only serving to massively increase attention and usage of those services. Suing Napster made Napster into the service to use. Ditto with Kazaa and Grokster. The Pirate Bay wasn't that big until Hollywood got Swedish authorities to raid the operations and confiscate the servers.

So, here we go again -- except this time it's even more ridiculous. Entertainment industry representatives have filed a lawsuit against the OpenBitTorrent tracker's hosting company (Update: noting that the lawsuit is against the hosting company), which is not a file sharing site or service at all. It's just an open tracker. Now, I recognize that folks in the entertainment industry aren't particularly knowledgeable about how technology works, but at some point, aren't they supposed to at least understand the basics? The tracker alone is not responsible for anything here -- and even more ridiculous is that the OpenBitTorrent guys (despite not being in the US) set up a DMCA-like process for taking down any info_hash if they want (which, by the way, was the reason the industry claimed it didn't sue Google -- because it took down links on request -- but now that OpenBitTorrent does the same thing, it's a problem?). Either way, with the rise of trackerless solutions means that even taking this site down won't much matter. Still, it makes you wonder what they're thinking over in the entertainment industry other than ways to increase their legal bills.

So anyone want to make a data haven like in Cryptonomicon? We need an idland country starving for cash with a king/queen/prime minister/president/dictator/whatever that won't interfere and big pipes to the internet's backbone.

"Insanity"

"The definition of insanity, the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

This faux-definition bothers me (especially the frequent attribution to Einstein to make it sound more important). Anyone who has studied modern physics knows there are plenty of things you can do the same way and get different outcomes.

It's amazing how something as useless and harmful to society as intellectual property can do so much to hinder such a useful and beneficial innovation like the opebittorrent tracker. This isn't about stopping piracy, the record labels and the government have made that VERY clear by making it very difficult for independent artists to release their music on corporate owned airwaves and on corporate owned cableco/telco infrastructure and by ensuring a monopoly on those airwaves and on that infrastructure. This is about ensuring that ALL content that is easily accessible to the public is only available at monopoly prices and that independent artists and movie makers get censored. This is EXACTLY what Hollywood et all seek to accomplish in their efforts and the evidence is that they have accomplished just that outside the Internet.

That's your third (fourth, fifth, ...) party

They are doing exactly what I expected them to do - they are going after third, then fourth and fifth parties... Pretty soon they are going to prove that strictly speaking (using their laws and logic) everybody is a criminal.

Next in line - people whose donations might have gone to sites that could have been kinda hosting torrent how-to's.

Next - those people's employers. 'Cause those money came from them. ;)

Re: That's your third (fourth, fifth, ...) party

The fact is that the damage that intellectual property is causing our society has gone far enough. THIS NEEDS TO STOP!!! NO ONE OWES ANYONE A MONOPOLY and we should NOT allow something as harmful as intellectual property to hinder perfectly good innovations for no good reason.

Yeah.. that hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
I certainly won't miss them. Time for these MAFIAA groups to go the way of the dinosaur. Since they are THAT OLD, anyway.
CDs have out-lived their use. Just as 8-track & cassette tapes have. DVDs are not too far behind them.
ARRRRRRRR!
;)